Tactics

[JonO]

Interesting! This is very specific for a PBM game (at least in my experience). Usually epic scale games skip over the player controlled tactical battles for purely computer moderated battles.

I come out of an RPG background (Traveler) and I suspect it shows. God-games can be lots of fun but I wanted to make the player-experience personal. It seems to have worked with one generation now its time to find out if'n it'll work with another.

Some questions:

[*] Will players re-target each tick/chunk?

Nope. It'd be a waste anyway. No-one is going to score a knockout punch on one round. There is an automatic switch to target the hull, however, if the target doesn't exist (either because it was never installed or has been destroyed) It just hit me that there should also be an option to cease firing in that situation.

ticks determine when something happens within a round. weapons with a high ROF may fire on the 4th, 7th, and 10th ticks, while a less automatic weapon may only fire on tick 6. In-system movement always happens on tick one and tick two is used for re-targeting (ships can be a full light second apart and still shooting so after every movement phase they have to find their target all over again) and boat-launching.

[*] How will the answer to the above affect players who can't logon more than once or twice a day?

This question puzzled me until I realized that I had led you astray. "days" is a metric within the game. Each 24 hours on earth gives the player a right to issue one more "day's" worth of orders. If I'd called them "labor units" I wouldn't have misled you, but I know from experience that players, once it's spelled out, handle the difference between a Rim-day and an earth-day easily enough

Time unused from the daily allotment goes into a "time bank" that holds up to 6 days and it may be withdrawn and used for everything except combat which is limited to 1 day's worth per 24 earthly hours.

A full day's combat will be over in a matter of seconds in real time.

[*] Theres more to space battles than targeting. Will you add support for planning paths ships will take to support things like frontal assaults, flanks, etc?

Oh yeah, this is one of 3 planned tactics screens - there's one to control movement, boat launch order, fleet-coordination, etc. And one for boarding parties. Ships have the option of carrying Marines who can be carried to a nearby opponent by Armored Boarding Shuttles (Think APC, but everyone told me not to use that name)

[*] This level of detail seems to preclude very large space battles, as giving orders to hundreds of ships would be tedious and very anti-fun. Do you expect space battles to be small?

Since every ship in a player's fleet will add to the cost of his subscription, I don't imagine there will be too many players with fleets running into the 100's. Anybody with the money to pay for that big a fleet will be too busy earning it to run that many.

However, there will be two options for fleet combat. One is a time coordinated attack where each player determines his ship's behavior as usual but the attacks start on a signal for the fleet's leader, and each round is found for all ships and bases before the next one. The other is a master-slave arrangement which essentially gives control of all ships to the fleet leader and they attack as a single unit. The maximum number than can be controlled this way will depend on the rating of the ship's Ops and Cbt programs. Both of these options are in there to give players a chance to attack starbases which can be built up to resemble a Darth Vader type death star (but without an Achilles heel that everybody knows about.)

One other thing I probably should mention: In-system movement configurations makes it probable that a smaller, less well-armed ship will be able to outrun and out-maneuver a larger more powerful ship.